Fellows Program
Fellows' Lives Lived
Edward R.F. Sheehan, a Fellow of the Center in 1974–1975, passed away on November 3, 2008, at the age of 78. He was laid to rest in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. A founder and longtime participant in the Center’s Middle East Seminar, Edward was fundamentally a writer: a foreign correspondent, playwright, and novelist by trade. He was also a diplomat, having served in Cairo and Beirut as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer from 1957 to 1961.
Edward’s calling was to deftly analyze high politics while indulging a need to explain the lives of common people often caught tragically in the crossfire of international events. He communicated a strong moral vision in everything he wrote and said.
A 1952 graduate of Boston College, Edward spent two years in the U.S. Navy before he began his career as a journalist with the Boston Globe reporting from Egypt, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, and Morocco. He wrote regularly for the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Among his novels were Kingdom of Illusion (1964); The Governor (1971), about Massachusetts politics; his 1993 examination of U.S.-Mexican immigration, Innocent Darkness; and the 1997 publication, Cardinal Galsworthy, a speculation on the possible succession to the papacy of a British prelate.
Read Sheehan's obituary on the Boston Globe.